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This easy-to-use, fast-moving tutorial introduces you to functional programming with Haskell. You'll learn how to use Haskell in a variety of practical ways, from short scripts to large and demanding applications. Real World Haskell takes you through the basics of functional programming at a brisk pace, and then helps you increase your understanding of Haskell in real-world issues like I/O, performance, dealing with data, concurrency, and more as you move through each chapter.

Product description

Book Description

Code You Can Believe In

About the Author

Bryan O'Sullivan is an Irish hacker and writer who likes distributed systems, open source software, and programming languages. He was a member of the initial design team for the Jini network service architecture (subsequently open sourced as Apache River). He has made significant contributions to, and written a book about, the popular Mercurial revision control system. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and sons. Whenever he can, he runs off to climb rocks.

John Goerzen is an American hacker and author. He has written a number of real-world Haskell libraries and applications, including the HDBC database interface, the ConfigFile configuration file interface, a podcast downloader, and various other libraries relating to networks, parsing, logging, and POSIX code. John has been a developer for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system project for over 10 years and maintains numerous Haskell libraries and code for Debian. He also served as President of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., the legal parent organization of Debian. John lives in rural Kansas with his wife and son, where he enjoys photography and geocaching.

Don Stewart is an Australian hacker based in Portland, Oregon. Don has been involved in a diverse range of Haskell projects, including practical libraries, such as Data.ByteString and Data.Binary, as well as applying the Haskell philosophy to real-world applications including compilers, linkers, text editors, network servers, and systems software. His recent work has focused on optimizing Haskell for high-performance scenarios, using techniques from term rewriting.

4.0 out of 5 starsGood for a first draft and especially for a Functional Programming book

May 1, 2009 - Published on Amazon.com

Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase

RWH is a solid book that gives the read a good idea of how Haskell works and why its unique. The book has its fault, largely because its a first draft that tries to cover a LOT of material. Don Stewart however has actively tried to aid in any deficiencies found by fixing errors on the web-version of this book so I'm not bothered by errors or things left out in the book.

The biggest complaint people have is that it tends to introduce concepts without really ever mentioning why something is being done. On one hand I agree with that assessment, however I also think that the book was marketed somewhat improperly. I would not call this book a good book for a beginner or your average intermediate programmer. At the very least I would say this book is better suited for experienced programmers or intermediate programmers with a passion for learning about languages.

That said, of the Functional Programming books I own, this is one of the best and most practical. It does not require a doctorate in Denotational Semantics to understand and it does not burn the first half of the book on typed/untyped lambda calculi (not that these things aren't important).

In short, if you want to get down to business working with a functional language, you have some experience with programming and are comfortable with a few errors then this book is for you.